Over the past couple of months I've reviewed a number of Nikon's recent compact and ultra-compact cameras, including the superb CoolPix S560, and the good but expensive S610c. Today I'm taking a look at the big brother of these two cameras, the 14.5-megapixel CoolPix S710 Nikon Battery Charger.
The S710 is a good looking camera. It has an all-aluminium body, and is available in black, titanium or silver. A burgundy red colour is also shown on Nikon's website, although that is probably not available in the UK. The body design is so understated it's almost plain, in that way that only expensive luxury gadgets can get away with. It is relatively large for an ultra-compact, measuring 92.5 x 57.5 x 24mm, and at approximately 170g fully loaded it is quite heavy too. You could carry it in a shirt pocket, but you'd certainly know it was there.
The front panel of the body is slightly bowed, and the smooth brushed finish of my silver review sample proved to be quite hard to grip securely. There is an indented thumb grip area on the back of the camera, but it doesn't help much. It's hard to hold the camera one-handed and operate the zoom control at the same time.
As a top-of-the-range model, the S710 Nikon Camera Charger has plenty of features. It has full auto, program auto, shutter and aperture priority and full manual exposure, as well as smile shutter, 16 scene mode programs, auto scene selection, sound recording and a video mode. However it does lack some other useful features, such as spot metering, an interval timer or any sort of adjustable colour control. The video mode is limited to 640 x 480 at 30fps, rather than the HD video capability of some of its rivals, and the digital zoom which is all that is available when shooting video is stepped and jerky.
The control layout is pretty straightforward, but the S710 is blessed/cursed with a rotary dial that also doubles as a D-pad. The rotary part of it is used for main mode selection, as well as adjusting exposure values in the manual modes, while it functions as a D-pad for menu navigation with secondary button functions for flash mode, self timer, macro mode and exposure compensation. I found this control to be quick and responsive, but also rather fiddly for my large fingers.
The camera Nikon CoolPix Charger features automatic red-eye correction; however this cannot be turned off. It also features Nikon's D-Lighting function, which brightens shadows in high-contrast shots, but this can only be applied in playback mode after the picture has been taken, and does introduce a lot of image noise into the darker areas of treated pictures. The other playback mode options are much more limited than some other recent compacts, offering only a basic slideshow function, print tagging, rotation, copying or resizing to very low resolutions.
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